It has been found that pupil interest can be stimulated, particularly in special education classes, by utilizing mechanical educational devices. Additionally, enthusiasm can be engendered by introducing competitive elements to the exercise wherein the manipulations of the mechanical devices include the accumulation on behalf of the student of tokens of accomplishment in meeting the challenge of the educational exercise.
Prior art educational devices have employed the game board principles of presenting a masked problem on some medium within the board structure which is selectively unveiled by the manipulative efforts of the instructor or the student to inject the enthusiasm of anticipation into the teaching process. A number of boards with windows in which problems are displayed selectively, including groups of problems mounted on moveable elements such as rotating disks, are known.
Seligmann U.S. Pat. No. 3,036,386 for Rhyming Device, discloses a pair of superposed disks centrally pivoted on each other and adapted to be rotated with respect to each other around the pivot by means of radially projecting ears. The front disk has a window and adjacent tab holders aligned along the disk radius. In use, tabs having letters marked thereon, are inserted in the holders and consonants or phonetic consonant groups, imprinted on the rear disk in a circular array, are individually presented in the window adjacent the tabs to form desired rhyming words or phonetic arrangements with the letters or letter groups on the tabs.
Other superposed relatively rotatable disk devices for forming words or word training are shown in Rubin U.S. Pat. No. 3,199,228 for Word Training Aid, Boyd U.S. Pat. No. 3,460,273 for Educational Device, and Coffman et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,762,071 for Teaching Aid.
Rubin employs a masked disk bearing a plurality of concentric circular arrays of pictures of objects with an adjacent word identifying the object. The masking disk has a radial, elongate window which is partially screened by a slider element which is moveable radially of the disk and contains a window to unmask only one picture-word combination of one of the circular arrays. In a further embodiment, an additional slider, having a masking window, is carried by the radial slider whereby the identifying word can be selectively masked.
Boyd combines two centrally pivoted disks with a masking panel containing a plurality of windows displaying interrelated information. Tabs can be applied to the periphery of a front disk and can be positioned adjacent a window to form words with the letters displayed in the window.
Coffman et al. includes a masking disk having a display window and an opening for access to sockets on underlying disks. An implement can be inserted in the sockets exposed through the openings to rotate the disks and align the characters imprinted on the disks with the display window. Three superposed, rotatable disks are shown with the two most proximate the masking disk having windows to reveal characters on the disks which underly them.
Board type devices are illustrated in Hawkins U.S. Pat. No. 3,136,074 for Educational Device; D'Agostino U.S. Pat. No. 3,200,517 for Word Forming Device; Hawkins U.S. Pat. No. 3,510,961 for Educational Devices, and Jimerson et al. U.S. Pat. No. 3,745,673 for Educational Game Toy. In each of these devices, one or more windows are provided in a front panel on which one or more disks having imprinted material is mounted. The disks are rotatable to bring the imprinted material into registry with a window. Information related to the imprinted material is presented at other windows by displacement of auxiliary devices, including slides and rotatable disks.
None of the aforementioned devices lends itself to competitive teaching techniques wherein information bearing elements are removed from the device as tokens of achievement. Nor do these mechanisms accomodate plural cycles of problem presentation as rounds in a teaching effort.